During supervision at GUFC, Dr. Bud Andres asked me, “Who do you have to hang onto?” I hadn’t considered that question before. The family roots were drying up, dying left and right, and I had not even seen that as a problem. All the successive deaths had just been “things” that were happening. I had no idea how they were influencing my relationships with other people in these times of heightened anxiety.
Looking at my nuclear family during times of crisis, particularly when there were deaths, I began to see how my family had adapted to pressure. People were increasingly cut off from one another, making it difficult to really know what was happening. Yet, there were also peaceful times with less stress, moments when windows opened—when people fell in love, got married, had children. Much of life is reacting to outward circumstances. Some people are lucky—attending good schools, being around rational parents and grandparents. Certain conditions seem to provide people with a better chance, all things being equal. It’s easy to assume those “good things” just happen, but “things” happen in a system because of the way the system has been wired.
This chapter looks back at my early life and at the way “things” that happened in the past continue to have some kind of influence on my life in the present. Memories may not be facts about the past, but the way we remember shapes decisions into the future. Perhaps this could be for the better if I could understand the forces that were active and do something about them instead of just following along.
From the “I” of the Storm to the Collapse of the Nuclear Family
From 1956 to 1962, the family was reasonably calm during this period. While warning signs existed, there were no major disruptions—no significant deaths in the nuclear or extended family, and no war had come to visit and upset the social order.
I was aware of the problems my parents had after WWII. As a child, I could easily see that their drinking was out of control, but I only knew a few things about my parents’ lives. Butch, Drew, and I were not raised by our parents but instead by our maternal grandparents and the family nanny, Gudrun Lund.
Now that I was an adult, I was curious about what my parents were like. I wanted to know how their lives and marriage might impact mine—as if that were possible. I wanted to be certain that their problems would not infect thee future plans for my own nuclear family and that I could avoid repeating the mistakes made by my parents and grandparents.
College Life and First Love
The summer after my first year at Marymount College in Tarrytown, NY, my high school friend Liz L. asked if she could visit me at my grandparents’ oceanfront home in Virginia Beach. She wanted to see her boyfriend, Marty, who was stationed nearby at Little Creek Naval Base. This was my first real introduction to Marty. They spent time together during her visit, but they broke up about a week later. I remained friendly with both parties. Marty bounced back, began dating another girl, and even borrowed my grandparents’ car to go on a date.
When college resumed and I was back in school, Marty called me from his aunt’s house which was nearby and invited me to go out. On our first date, I offered to pay for half of the meal and gave him half of my hamburger. He appreciated my kindness. Marty, the captain of the football team at Holy Cross College, had his foot in a cast. During what became his last game of the season, he was tackled while playing tight end, breaking his foot.
Marty had all the good qualities: no drinking, went to church, was a good athlete, handsome – all the “known” boxes were checked. Overall, he seemed to be kind and that was important to me. All my friends liked him, which meant another test was passed. With his family nearby, he was able to visit me more often. All the ingredients were there for me to have my first feelings of love. Wow, that was amazing.
After dating for maybe close to two years, Marty wanted to marry me, or else “we” should break up. I was about to finish my second year of college, but I happened to be dating him at the time that he was ready to get married as he was graduating. I was planning to go to Europe with my friends, but this was not to be. Independence and marriage did not go together in my worldview. Each of us was planning for a rational life. Besides, I wanted two children so my grandparents could get to know their great-grandchildren. In my imagination, I thought great-grandchildren would be evidence that they had done an excellent job despite the cost of losing their only daughter to alcohol and rescuing us, their grandchildren, from an orphanage.
Marriage and Motherhood
“We”, Mary and I, were two young people unaware of the shadows from the past and how they would impact our marriage. Some members of the family were not to be spoken of, and there was no coherent narrative about the tension between family members—it just seemed that some issues simply could not be resolved. And yet, here I was, about to get married, just when knowledge about the family secrets may have mattered the most.
On June 16, 1962—a hot summer day in Virginia, Marty and I, both dressed in white, were married in the Star of the Sea Church. I was 20, he was 21. All the groomsmen were dressed in Marine Corps white—except for my brother Butch, who arrived in his own perfectly tailored black suit, complete with white socks.
Our wedding reception took place at the Princess Ann Country Club where my maternal grandfather had been one of the founding members. My father arrived with his parents, and his mother Cecilia, had purchased a special dress for the occasion—she looked lovely. Dressing up was a big deal for her.
My father and I danced for a moment. Sweet hopes covered the cracks—cracks where, beneath the surface of the celebration, family members were missing, and their absence was not yet to be acknowledged. Some of the family history spilled onto the dance floor. I heard that my great-aunt Alice had refused to come to the wedding. She had been married to my paternal grandfather’s brother, Horace, and their only child was Dana—my mother’s favorite cousin, both born in 1918. The story went that my great-grandmother, Mary Jane Wales (b. 11/10/1865), had once been accused of saying that Dana had a fat head—and that was all it took for Alice to cut herself off from the Wales-Maher family entirely. I didn’t know what to make of these stories at the time, but they stayed with me.
After the joy-filled ceremony, we returned to basic ways of managing the anxiety of two individuals becoming one “we.” The question no one was going to ask was, “Who would dominate in this marriage?” Marty and I had borrowed my grandfather’s car with air conditioning as “we” were headed into the hot and deep South for our honeymoon. Marty was adamant that “we” should not use the air conditioning as “we” could get “spoiled” since our own small car had no air conditioning. “We” compromised by keeping his window down and my head next to the air conditioner. The “we” was becoming two opposing “I” s. This positioning was automatic, not anything either of us chose.
Then there was the whole embarrassing thing of being seen going to a hotel with a man. I had my newspaper clipping of our marriage in case anyone doubted what was happening. Honeymoons are not the best for shy women. I was concerned that others might think I was up to “no good.” Perhaps I was reactive to my mother’s countless boyfriends and what people thought of her. At some really deep, primitive level, I did not want to be like my mother.
Both of us might have been immature, perhaps not knowing how to cooperate or talk to each other when the tension was up. If cooperation were not possible, one of us would have to dominate to be a “we.” It was a workout to keep two “I” s on the same page. “We” knew nothing, but who did know about the automatic tendency for one to lead and the other to automatically follow? The “I” versus the “we” was hard to see, so one of us would have to give in and go along with the other one. Conflict and distance would be our primary way of communicating around any upset. Our honeymoon told the tale of deeply rooted, hard-to-understand conflict and the misunderstandings registered as a sort of betrayal.
After the honeymoon, Marty went into active duty with the Marine Corps stationed at Quantico. I had many issues with war even without tracing the problems of war back to my dad. In Vietnam, I could hear that the war and killing were particularly awful. I was afraid. Looking back, both of us were emotionally blind to the influence of the past shadows on our future, yet the drum of war was beating, slowly reminding me of so many things.
The possibility of war was exciting for some of the Marines at that time. The generals and senior men told the young boys, “Lucky. You might get into combat and earn your medals.” I felt this pull to be loyal to the Marines and to my husband while dreading what might happen to Marty without connecting the past and my parents to my current worries.
A Series of Beginnings – Births and Deaths
Our son Martin was born on April 8, 1963, while “we” were stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Marty and I drove to the hospital, and as soon as I arrived, my water broke. They had already sent Marty home, telling him it would be a few hours since it was my first child. But, by the time he got home, he received a call of congratulations, “Surprise! You have a son.”
There were a series of visits, starting with Marty’s family. My maternal grandmother came to visit, and then Gudrun Lund, who had come to this country in 1922 when my mother was 4 years old and was still working for my grandparents as a nanny. Each one of them came and stayed for a week to help me.
DEATH A little under a year later, my paternal grandfather, “Papa” James L. Maloney, died on March 3, 1964. It was a sudden but quiet death for me, and he was buried in Williamsburg, Virginia. At the funeral, I had not been around people who drank, and there was a lot of drinking occurring – which I was allergic to – the threat of alcoholism. The loudness and laughter took me back. At this point in my life, I preferred being in a more socially controlled atmosphere. I do not recall Marty or the children attending, but I do remember my cousin Liz Eitt being there. She was 10 years younger than me, too young to relate to, just yet, but it may have been the beginning of our becoming more friendly first cousins.
I do not recall being very moved by my paternal grandfather’s death. Perhaps his death was uneventful because I was not that close to him – it didn’t spark any sad feelings. I was not going to miss him. The final visit was with a dead person, yet I was left with good memories of this handsome, shockingly white-haired man who was a poet with a great smile.
I also heard gossip – that my grandfather had a drinking problem. I never saw that. As far as I was concerned, the rumors had to be wrong. He had kept his job at the Newport News Shipbuilding Company, where he was a mechanic for over 50 years. How much of an alcoholic could he have been? I could not understand the seeming disconnect between what I considered to be gossip and the person I knew.
I was soon pregnant again and was amazed and happy to learn that I was going to have a girl, Michelle. I was pregnant with Michelle in 1964 when “we”, Marty, Martin and I moved back to Quantico, where she was born on October 28. Both my maternal grandparents and my in-laws came right away to visit Michelle and Martin after their births. However, not surprisingly, my father’s side—the Maloney family—visited later, only after seeing other relatives and another newborn in the Maloney line. I knew far more about my Schara in-laws and my mother’s Maher side of the family than I did about my father’s Maloney side. Their visit included my paternal grandmother, Cecelia, and my aunt Betty with Betty’s daughter, Liz, who was fast becoming one of my best friends. These were the cool, calm days of marriage and small children and I would say that both children were born into an excited and delighted multigenerational family.
Of course, the one dark cloud on the horizon was that neither of my parents had come to see their grandchildren. I was aware of these missing people, my parents. I knew not to talk about missing them. Everyone knew they were alcoholics, and that is what was wrong with them. I still wanted my father to get to know his grandchildren. As I recall, “we,” Marty and I, stopped in to visit in Williamsburg, Virginia, during our move back to Virginia Beach from Quantico. I wanted to introduce my dad to these two new children in this growing family.
At the time, I recall two strong emotions. On the one hand, there was my husband, the new soldier, young and strong. I could feel his strength and his willingness to go to war. Then there was my father, who had been to war, seemingly weakened by his long battle with depression and alcoholism, which was sad for me to see. Yet, the overriding emotion, even to this day, was hope. There were two new children to carry us on into the future.
The Impact of War on Family
Time marched on very slowly, but I could see and hear that the Vietnam War was worsening, amidst waning support. I had my first genuine concern about the war and what I would do with two small children if something happened to Marty.
In the background, I did not want Marty to continue to serve in the Marines, but I knew it was up to him. I did not want to interfere with his decision. I also realized that the past—as to my parents’ lives falling apart—was silently threatening me. I was aware of the fear that something could be repeated. I thought about my mother and father’s failure to manage their children during the war. Could that happen to me? This awareness was crying out for me to act, and so I did.
When Marty was ordered to go to Okinawa and then Vietnam, it made sense to us for me to go live with my grandparents instead of living by myself on the Marine Corp base for 18 months while he was gone. Living with my grandparents could be more like a vacation. Besides their oceanfront home and my close friend Shirlie Camp living next door, Gudrun was still there and would be available to assist me with the children. Marty and I moved all our things into storage, and I returned to my warm, safe, and familiar lifestyle.
My thoughts and concerns were shifting to curiosity about my mother having been cast out of the family. What bugged me the most was that I could not yet talk about the reasons that my parents, especially my mother, were so distant and so unknowable. There appeared to be no observable effort to change things by those doing reasonably well. As I saw it, it was up to me to do something.
Visiting My Mother
I was determined to see my mother and break the “worry spell” that haunted me. After all, Marty was not my father, I was not my mother, and this was not WWII. After settling in at my grandparents’ home, Marty and I set off on a cross-country drive to California to visit with his family in Chicago, Illinois before his departure to Okinawa, Japan. After Marty and I said our goodbyes, I headed to the airport for the next leg of my journey, Portland, Oregon, where my mother had been living, concealed from me, since I was 10 years old. Truth be told, there was a feeling of dread, and I was anxious as hell. I was both excited to see her and I was aggravated that I knew very little about her and her life. I knew very little about my father, but even less about my mother. Who was this mother of mine that I was going to meet when I got off the plane?
When my mother picked me up at the airport, I was startled to see and hear her as she sounded as if she had been drinking. I asked her about her slurred voice, but she explained to me that her jaw had been wired as the result of one of her ex-boyfriends hitting her and breaking it. She firmly stated that she was not drinking, but I was only a bit reassured.
Walking into her house, I saw that it was clean and organized—a small but significant relief. It reassured me that, to some degree, she was managing her life. She even had a portable keyboard, which she played beautifully. The sound instantly brought back memories of when she used to play the piano and sing. Now, she only played the keyboard, but her talent was undeniable. Even without her lovely voice, it was clear how much she loved her music. I was impressed and told her so, genuinely moved by how well she could still play. I again experienced relief, but now, in a funny way – I was glad I never took piano lessons as I might have had to compete with my musically gifted mother, and I liked to win.
In addition, the station wagon she had was given to her by my grandparents. I thought they were so generous, yet I knew they were afraid to see their only child. I understood the fear of not knowing if your loved one is going to be sober or not – it stinks. The next day we drove down to where she was employed at a local women’s hat shop. The ladies there were extremely excited to meet me, and there was an overall feeling of happiness. I saw that she had friends that she worked with and saw her strength besides just her weakness.
Home Again
Back in Virginia Beach, Shirlie and I would take the children down to the beach, and sometimes, we’d laugh as we complained about having to drop everything when the lunch bell rang. No matter what we were doing, we had to gather the children and their toys, give them showers, and dress them in fancy clothes for a meal that had already been prepared for us. There were many people available to help. How different was this from my mother’s time of being a war wife, living with only her parents? I got the feeling she did not have as much fun as I was having.
I do not know what gave me courage, but a couple of months after I returned from the Portland trip, I convinced my grandparents to allow my mother to return to Virginia to see her children and grandchildren. My grandparents paid for my mother to come home to visit for a couple of weeks and things seemed to go smoothly. This was her first visit to see her children in 13 years and the first time our mother had seen my children. Drew, now 15 years old, was present, but Butch was not around at the time—he was surfing in Hawaii.
I was proud of my grandparents for letting her come back. It took 13 years and having two children for me to insist that this was the right thing to do – that punishing her for drinking was no longer a good enough reason to go along with how my grandparents were handling the situation. It was the first time I was defining myself to my grandparents and I knew it was hard on them to see my mother again. I knew my grandparents did not “like her” and disapproved of her behavior, and yet, there she was.
In the 24 years since my mother lost custody of her children (I was 10 at the time), I saw her twice out in Portland Oregon and brought her back to Virginia Beach twice. On the last and final visit to Virginia Beach, my mother talked about the war and how her husband leaving to fight was a breaking point. She emphasized how she never collected her widow’s benefits after my father died. My mother was still aggravated. My parents and I were still caught up in plenty of unresolved emotional issues.
Losses and Turning Points
Meanwhile, during Marty’s time overseas, “we” were in daily letter-writing contact. “We” were talking about what might be his choice as to his career. He concluded that he could either stay in the Marines or attend law school. Lucky me, he decided he did not want to re-enlist. However, there was more tension between us when he returned.
After Marty came back from the war, he decided to go to law school at the University of Virginia. I was grateful for that, but now, how would he get into that law school? My grandfather knew people on the board at the University who could help. They interviewed Marty and were impressed that he served in the Marine Corps and fought in Vietnam. He had passed the interpersonal test and was accepted.
Visiting My Father
When I was young, my father lived just a little over an hour away and he would come to visit us three children if someone drove him to Virginia Beach, where my maternal grandparents lived with us. I would see him here and there, off and on. Even as I grew older, I still knew very little about my father’s life or that he was occasionally in and out of treatment for alcoholism at the Williamsburg State Hospital.
I imagine my father must have felt so bad after having bankrupted his business with the borrowed money from my grandfather. As I understood it, my father never told his father-in-law the truth about the situation he was in, about the drinking and spending money he did not have, which eventually did catch up with him. It must have been difficult for our father to visit. People did not trust him, and he must have known at some level that he had let his father-in-law down.
I understood that my father had lived on his own in an incredibly warm and modest room, situated above a kiln at his brother’s pottery shop, the Williamsburg Pottery Factory. As he grew much older and weaker, he moved into an apartment with his mother after his father died. Now, as a young mother of two small children, I was taking them to visit. At that time, I was somehow freer to speak with him. “Dad. You were so intelligent and handsome. Now, your liver is failing, and you are all yellow. What happened to you?” My father cried; he seemed unable to express everything or anything that was on his mind. As the years passed, perhaps all the emotional decisions were too heavy to talk about. Perhaps it was better to cry and to carry the family problems in silence.
DEATH Then, without my being aware of how my father’s death might impact our little nuclear family, he died suddenly at the age of 58 from a heart attack on August 25, 1967. I was 26. When it was time for the funeral, “we” decided that Marty should stay home with the children. That was such a wrong decision. Instead of being with my nuclear family, I went with my brother Drew to our dad’s funeral. I felt very alone and could not communicate my upset. Drew was 16 at the time and did not or could not articulate what he was feeling either.
There was no way that I could understand all the moving parts as to what had happened to my father and how his life ended. The message from the family to me was that it really did not matter if one understood what was happening. Instead, there was the silent message – “Just go on with life as it is.” The Marine Corps captain gave me the American flag, folded perfectly. He spoke of my father’s courage and willingness to fight in the war. I knew nothing about it. At the end of the ceremony, a wave of sadness swept over me; I could not put his life together with the war effort. I had lost my father, whom I barely knew. I became more withdrawn, and that did not help my marriage.
Marital Struggles – The Beginning of the Undoing
After Marty was accepted into law school, we moved to Charlottesville and lived in student housing. It was in his second year of law school that my father died. My maternal grandparents were getting older, and those years were becoming increasingly difficult. After Marty graduated, we moved back to Virginia Beach, where Marty had a job working for a maritime law firm. Without either of us considering what was happening in my extended family—my maternal grandmother, Anna Maher, growing gravely ill with heart problems and my grandfather struggling to function—my husband decided he no longer wanted to work for the law firm nearby in Norfolk, Virginia. Now, Marty wanted to work for my Uncle Jimmy as an employee of his pottery factory, where my father had also lived and worked, about an hour and a half away.
How was I going to move to Williamsburg when my grandparents were ill? I knew Marty loved being outside and building things and that he admired Jimmy, who had made a fortune despite only having a high school education. To me, the problem was extremely challenging. I was torn between moving and helping my husband or staying and helping my grandparents. The next thing I knew, the distance in our relationship reached the boiling point as my grandmother, Anna Maher, went in and out of the hospital.
DEATH Then, to make matters worse, my paternal grandmother, “Nanny” Cecelia, died in April of 1971. I had gotten closer to her after “Papa” died. In addition to this, only two years separated my grandfather’s death from my father’s, and the compounded loss was a heavy burden to bear. Nanny had been looking after my father, and after my father died, she got sick. For the last few days of her life, her bedroom was moved from upstairs down into the dining room. I went to visit, and the image of her in the hospital bed in the dining room was shocking. What a difference seeing her helpless and close to death made on me.
Nanny had picked me, her son’s oldest daughter – to be close to her and her other granddaughter, Liz. Before this, I saw her as a motherly woman who loved to cook and laugh – she was so caring. When my father died, she cried and hugged me. I had no words to encourage her at my father’s funeral, and now, I was headed to hers. She was the oldest of eight children, who left home at 18 and was soon thereafter married. Whenever her husband, my ‘Papa,’ drank, she would go live with her sibling-sisters in Elyria, Ohio, or so I was told.
Again, I drove up to that funeral alone. On the positive side, this time, my father’s family surrounded me. This allowed my cousin Liz and myself to have more one to one time to bond. Nanny had pushed Liz towards me for years, so it was natural that we became more trustworthy friends during Nanny’s funeral. Liz also wanted to understand the family and her own missing father too. For me, our friendship was based on this intense need to forge stronger relationships, possibly changing the family’s future and creating more positive memories. There was a sense that neither Liz nor I could just walk away from the family problems unscathed. Each of us felt a responsibility to change our relationships with people in the family. I just wasn’t sure how to do that yet. I did not know what to do about all these deaths, and a more significant death was coming. I was unprepared.
DEATH Toward the end of my maternal grandmother’s life, she told me that she wanted Gudrun to return to Norway. She told me that Gudrun had worked for her for all these years and she did not want the hired help to see her getting weak and helpless. I recall asking, “So who’s going to look after you?” She replied, “You will help out. I do not know what you will do with your grandfather though.” I said, “Well, you did it, so how bad could it be?” I had no idea what a handful my grandfather was, nor did I realize how my maternal grandmother’s death might impact my functioning and, thereby, my marriage.
One day, I was at my grandparents’ home helping my grandmother get into bed when she started to fall – she was having a heart attack. I called 911. They placed her in the ICU, where she got weaker and weaker until one day, she just stopped breathing. I had left the room briefly to smoke a cigarette, but when I returned, I saw the nurse pulling the sheet up and over her head. I knew she was gone; she was dead. I thought to myself, if only I had stayed, she might not have died, but she took her moment to make the transition without me.
I was flooded with memories of my times with her: going fishing, untangling fishing lines, trying to teach me to knit, how to cook biscuits, peach pie, making hollandaise sauce, snapping beans on the front porch, looking at dresses that she wanted me to wear, writing my college essay for me, making my debut, driving me to tennis matches around the state, the frightening way she drove her car through New York City, and then of course, getting ready for my wedding. There were just so many memories, and she was organizing the family as best she could. She was a beautiful soul who also was human enough to tell me that she could not forgive her daughter. I never even asked, “For what?”
She died at age 75 on December 15, 1972, and I was bereft. No one could take her place, even though I might try to find another strong woman to be a part of my life. I had family and friends, and while they were all supportive and caring, they were not my grandmother.
Life as I knew it was over. I had to find my way. Knowing nothing about reactivity around loss or the emotional shock wave, I asked Marty for a separation. He felt betrayed. All this took place three months after my grandmother’s death. “We” separated on February 17, 1973. Neither of us could see how the multiple family deaths could and did impact us. I fell off an emotional cliff.
Career Shift and Personal Growth
After my grandmother died, I fell apart, and life became far more chaotic. I did not know how to manage myself. My grandfather was trying to figure out what was going on and now I had my grandfather to care for and my two brothers, none of whom were doing well. As my grandfather had increasingly more difficulty functioning, I realized he could not live by himself anymore. I reasoned that I was getting divorced because I could not take care of one more person, plus I just could not tolerate any negativity. Another big problem was that I had no way to support myself with only two years of college and never having had a job.
When my grandmother died, my grandfather took it extremely hard. He was hospitalized for a time, crashed his car into the garage, and could no longer drive. I talked it over with him as we both realized he had to sell the house that he and my grandmother lived in. It made sense to go back to living in a condominium, where there were more of his friends available. It was becoming clearer that he was not going to make it living by himself.
When Butch and I went over to his new place, he would instruct us to sit quietly and watch the show that Barbara Walters was on. If either of us dared to talk, he would severely reprimand us for disturbing Barbara with our “chit-chat.” My grandfather acted like Barbara Walters was right in the room with us. I was very worried and upset about these developments. What was I going to do now?
A Decision to Divorce
I was not functioning at my best. I had no idea what it would take to understand my financial and emotional situation. My head went round and round, thinking of all the possibilities. If my grandfather stayed in his condominium, he would have to have round-the-clock help, but I sensed that he would not take kindly to strangers coming into his home. Finally, I realized the obvious: I called Gudrun and begged her to come out of retirement and help me with my grandfather.
Gudrun answered the call of desperation. She came just in time for me to tell her about my decision to divorce. She told me flat-out that it was a terrible mistake. In her view, marriage could not be as difficult as living with the Germans, and she had managed that. I did not have the strength she had, or marriage was just way more intense for me. Fortunately, Gudrun was there to help manage this tremendous upheaval in our family. She returned as a significant person in my fragmented family life.
Tribe of Friends
Surrounding the changes in my family were the changes in society. This was a different time, an exciting time, a time of civil rights and upheaval in the country. This was the 70s; most of us were smoking pot. “We” were esoteric and liberated to some extent – freeing ourselves from the strict and dull fifties. I wrote in my journal about my feelings and began to understand myself better. Yet, financially, my life was out of control. I had made a bad investment with one of my friend’s boyfriends.
Good relationships made a tremendous difference in the quality of my life. I formed a tribe of other single women or divorced mothers who helped each other by looking out for one another and our children. I had 12 friends, and everyone had gotten divorced if they were married. “We” went on ski trips and hiked. To me, having a tribe was far superior to dating someone who then disappeared. I had no idea how the changes in society were affecting so many marriages during the time of “free love” that cost so much.
Reflections
It is difficult to recall these years of uncertainty (1967–1976) without feeling dread. My life was out of control. I knew I needed knowledge, as my life had no direction until Butch became Jesus.
For me, the most significant death in my family was the loss of my maternal grandmother, which occurred three months before I asked my husband for a separation. I had no idea these two events could be related, just as I had no realistic sense that our mother’s death and Butch becoming Jesus could be connected. I just knew that it was weird. The nuclear family is where I saw these extreme moments unfold, but only after the fact could I begin to see how all these kinds of deaths had an impact on the system—and that took me two years in the postgraduate program to begin to see—the connections. It takes time to understand the automatic nature of human behavior.
One of the critical factors this chapter considers is the difference between focusing on an individual with a symptom and seeing the emotional system surrounding the symptoms. Bowen Family Systems Theory looks at the individual as part of the system. When a nodal event occurs, anxiety rises. The pressure in the family builds to a certain point, and then the anxious family focuses on someone as the problem and asks them to behave. This occurs when people fail to see the system and its effect on individuals. Somehow, they easily discount the system. It is not easy to see the emotional system, even though it is in charge. It tells you, “Don’t look at this or that, don’t engage with that individual—it’s too painful.”
Reading about triangles in Bowen Theory was one thing, but truly seeing how they functioned was another. Until I could recognize them in action, I remained emotionally blind to the pressure and time was needed for me to see and understand how triangles operated. How they functioned between Butch and Gudrun, or between me and my grandfather, was difficult to observe objectively. I could recognize that Gudrun was a tremendous help during the two chaotic years after my divorce, yet at the time, I didn’t fully appreciate the impact of how I was relating to both her and my grandfather and how the three of us might be connected—not until my exposure to Family Systems Theory and six months before he died.
Every relationship is shaped by embedded, historical, triangles, a magical blend of who the other needs us to be and who “we” need them to be for us to feel safe, to be happy, to be cool. The pressure to be a certain way because someone else needs us to be that way—that is the weight of the emotional system. The emotional system’s pushing, pulling, and demands are its way of managing anxiety about death, loss, and the question of who one is now, lingers on in the air.
Looking back, I can see the limits—the limits of what my grandparents could do, the limits of what my mother could do, and my own difficult, hard-to-see limits as well. Choices that seem clear now simply weren’t available then. I just knew I did not want to keep relying on the same coping mechanisms, blame, but at the time, I couldn’t even conceive of alternatives. The system itself had limited flexibility, and so did I. Thinking about other choices that could have been made, was too hard. It was like pushing a gigantic rock up a hill, only for it to roll back, repeatedly. There was no choice for me, but to keep pushing on that damn rock.
And yet, maybe I found ways to do just enough to satisfy the sorrow of having a mother who was extruded. Would I have had more flexibility if I had known how to operationalize different ways of thinking? If I had been able to talk to my grandparents about the situation with my mother or about the cost of extrusion? I was beginning to see how little flexibility each of us has, unless I could forge my way into the world of free will. But to get there, I had to know enough to be able to go against the system.
I could also see that triangles exist not just between the living, but that the dead are part of them too. The presence of a third person in the background—visible or not—continues to shape the emotional system. The two who are closest draw together at the expense of the third, who is pushed to the outside.
When my grandfather and Butch were close, who was the one left out? Maybe it was Drew. And with my grandfather and Gudrun, who did they worry about? Who was the problem person? Butch? Drew? Me? Triangles can function both positively and negatively—negative in the sense that blaming others comes at a cost, offering a false sense of clarity or helping to make instinctual reactions feel more understandable.
This is how negative triangles function. The anxiety gets shifted onto the person labeled as the problem—the one people tell stories about to the one they hope will sympathize with their view. Triangling is a way to make sense of what one does automatically with the anxiety. Side taking seems to strengthen your own view, if you can get more and more people on your side. It seems so natural, especially when you don’t understand what’s happening. “Why am I getting divorced? What happened?” I could partially see what happened, but I couldn’t understand what happened.
Closeness can be achieved through conflict, and even distance can mask intense emotional connections. Sometimes, it feels like there is no real choice—only the fight to manage emotional reactivity. It was and remain difficult for me to resist the automatic stimulus-response cycle that gets triggered when someone is disregarded or repulsive or rejected; when something is off between people and it is impossible to put the confusion into words – about who are you and who am I, shall we cooperate, or shall we fight?
Dr. Bowen made this point: people at the same level of emotional maturity were attracted to each other as though they were magnets. When things are good, the two magnets attract one another. When stress is high, the magnets repel each other. In both cases, the magnets are drawn to the other in a way. Their behavior is determined by the laws of nature, like physics, and what can be learned from that?
Even repulsion is still attraction. The energy remains in the system like a closed circuit, continually shifting and reorganizing within relationships. Whether through conflict, distance, or projection, the connection persists—reshaping itself rather than resolving any relationship problems. I may think about how the other person wronged me, what I did wrong, how things fell apart—but my focus was still on them. The connection was still there, even when it looked like distance or cutoff. I was still thinking about them and or are reacting to everything they did.
Understanding the automatic, instinctual way of relating did not make it automatically easier to overcome my reactivity. But it did make one thing clearer:
I am reacting.